Wagamama High Spec (ワガママハイスペック) Review

There was a weird new show in the April anime lineup called Wagamama High Spec. I forget how they translated the title into Chinese — something like “Selfish High-Spec.” Barely any content, insanely short episodes, and it made basically no sense at all.

Turns out it’s an eroge adaptation, and the game hadn’t even shipped yet when the anime started airing, so the whole thing was just a promo ad for the game. Whether it’s a short or not doesn’t really matter.

In the end, how good this thing is depends on the game.

A while back I saw someone saying DOOM was going for a retro route, and I don’t buy it. DOOM just went back to what games fundamentally are; that’s not retro, that’s how games should be.

Speaking of retro, I’d argue Wagamama High Spec is more of a retro thing — retro for eroge.

What does a retro-style eroge look like? Exactly like Wagamama High Spec: school, student council, student council president, a kouhai, a little sister, and a senpai. A basic love flag setup, and a calm plot progression.

Yeah, calm. Wagamama barely has any big twists. The gist: the protagonist has a sister and a house, parents dead (allegedly), and since the family’s kind of poor (probably), he’s working with an artist to plan a weekly serialized manga. Then while his editor is hounding him for pages, he accidentally discovers that the student council president, Kagurazaka Kaoruko, is the artist he’s collaborating with. So the president drags him into the student council on the excuse of “easier communication,” then drags his sister Narumi Toa in because he can fix computers, and then the sister drags in her best friend Miyase Miharu. So the whole student council is the protagonist plus his four romanceable targets… president, vice president, little sister, kouhai. From there the game settles into the classic eroge harem trajectory…

Super typical. Almost every eroge following the steady, safe route from the ’90s through the last few years runs exactly like this. These games were built for romance simulation, and as male-oriented stuff they need a bit of harem flavor: watch the girls circle around you, chat and laugh through everyday life, have little incidents that develop the relationship, and once things feel right, drop a flag and get a confession. Then it’s dumb-couple flirting, sex when there’s nothing better to do, an epilogue about the future, roll ED.

And Wagamama High Spec really does it that way. The president’s route is clearly the game’s sanctioned route — check the OP, all the images are from the president’s route. And yet her route is the one with the least novelty. Probably because the story starts with her in the first place, so it ends up serving as a kind of main line. The president route is the two of them getting closer through manga collaboration, learning more about each other, and finding out why she loves drawing manga — the reason is kind of nonsense… (“the two-dimensional ape saved me from despair” or whatever). The final confession is sweet enough, and the couple life afterward is pretty good too — no huge ups and downs, but not boring. Later the protagonist gets jealous because the president’s art is so good that a big-name author wants to poach her, so he decides to improve his own writing; after some effort he earns the writer’s recognition and keeps his artist partner/girlfriend. All of which is irrelevant to the main line, honestly — the two of them being lovey-dovey matters more.

Maybe sweet romance is just like that. Plus the president’s CV, Honda Mariko, is… outstanding. Soft, gentle voice, and she nails the president’s airheadedness, along with a bit of deadpan dark side in certain states. The ending is hilarious: the president and the protagonist come to China for a trip, and she sees a translated volume of her own manga. Seriously, that Dere Dere XXX borderline-smut manga the protagonist plans would never get published in China…

Next, the sister Narumi Toa’s route is kind of interesting. My motive for playing it was ugly… yeah, the CV is Gotou Mai. As a seiyuu fan I’m not even going to deny my ugliness anymore. In hindsight the sister route isn’t as complete as the president’s, and plenty of parts are baffling, but overall it’s way more fun. The protagonist gets asked by his editor to “add a chapter where the sister gets involved” because readers demand it, so he starts binge-reading siscon works at home for inspiration. Eventually the sister says “You’ve got a sister right here, why are you reading siscon stuff, let’s just try being a couple.” The fun part is that at first the sister seems totally uninterested in him, and she’s super unenthusiastic about pretending to be a couple on their date; she just calls him “Darling, also known as Onii-chan” and drags him straight to the game store she wants to go to, does a lap for her own satisfaction, and the protagonist feels nothing. Then the president sees him agonizing over “not understanding siscon” and decides to impersonate his sister to go on a date with him, which makes him feel the romance. The sister watches her brother and gets visibly annoyed, like “this sister isn’t up to the job,” and realizes she’s always been treating her brother like a tool…

What should follow is a tangled, drawn-out arc where the relationship between the sister and protagonist slowly changes, and they struggle against social prejudice and drift toward taboo territory… but no. The game has the protagonist confess to his sister, out of nowhere, so sudden I had no fucking idea what was happening. The story after that feels like it’s about to get axed. Quick sex, quick couple, quick announcement they’re dating. Just when I thought the game was wrapping up, the protagonist suddenly collapses from illness and the manga goes on hiatus, and the story slows down and kicks off a second arc. Facing her sick brother, the sister realizes how much she depends on him, and that she’s done nothing but cause trouble for him. After some agonizing and effort she changes, and the two of them start taking care of each other.

Naturally the ending is happy for everyone: the protagonist returns to being a manga artist, keeps making new work with the president, the old work gets a drama CD and its popularity rises, and the sister becomes the pillar of the protagonist’s household instead of the useless lump she was before.

All in all, Wagamama High Spec doesn’t sell itself on plot development; it’s mostly about building characters. That’s honestly the essence of a romance game. And on character-building, Wagamama High Spec does a solid job: the airheaded president, the tsundere vice president, the little-devil kouhai, the cold and sharp-tongued sister — each one’s label is obvious, their speech patterns and body language are spot-on, and otaku can take what they want from each. The dialogue is pretty funny too, or at least you won’t be bored. Paring it down to anime terms, it’s about the level of a tea-and-chill show — and the game’s anime really is that style, except they cut the protagonist so it feels like a yuri show. The character design has clear strengths and weaknesses: the strengths are the CG composition and anatomy, plus the expressions, and the SDCGs are a bonus. The weakness is the oversized breasts and the weird coloring — way too digital. Would’ve been better more natural. The music is upper-tier for a moege; these days it’s rare enough for an eroge’s BGM to crossfade smoothly and not sound like cheap electronic music, so Wagamama High Spec is doing fine there.

The CV performances need no explanation — play it and you’ll know. Honda Mariko apparently made her eroge debut with this game, and she was a standout; after that she started snatching up eroge heroines like crazy, probably because she’d been holding it in too long and needed the money. Gotou Mai, as a veteran, is still adorable, and as a sister specialist she performs… exactly like Uryuu Sakuno. That’s not a flaw! I repeat, that is absolutely not a flaw!

Anyway, Wagamama High Spec really is a “retro”-style game. Remember what the earliest pure-love eroge were like? A male protagonist meets a bunch of cute girls, falls in love with them, reaches an ending. No foreshadowing, no big twists, just cute girls. That’s it.

Wagamama High Spec isn’t a game with novelistic plot, and it isn’t a work that grabs attention with big twists. What it gives you is four girls with completely different personalities, each with her own charm, and a lovely time in love. And that stuff isn’t unpleasant — if anything it makes us long for it more, doesn’t it?